And the Chaff: Dartmouth's WorstAndrew Garrod Many unsuspecting freshmen choose Garrod's Education 20 course because it is hailed in certain circles as "the best class at Dartmouth." Others stumble into the class expecting an easy A for mastering Horton Hears a Who. You will, alas, be seriously disappointed if you anticipate either. All assignments are graded by upper-class education minors and required to be endlessly re-written with little explanation. Garrod himself does not apologize for his political biases and is wont to show them, presenting as undisputed fact arguments for his pet liberal causes.
A dubious distinction, this professor was featured in the very first issue of The Dartmouth Review—over twenty-five years ago. She is still causing problems on the Dartmouth campus today. She is perhaps the most notoriously biased grader in Dartmouth's history and a feminist reactionary to the bone.
Commodari teaches Chem 5 and 6, pretty basic classes, so as a freshman you might run up against him for any number of reasons. Look out. He often seems ignorant of the material. Worse, he's been known to have angry outbursts in class where he taunts students. He's also an extraordinarily arbitrary grader—rare in the sciences. As we say, look out.
How Professor Boose managed to secure a position at Dartmouth is astounding. Nothing good can be said about this lady. She left her English 5 class to sit through more than four weeks of soap operas in place of class lectures. She frequently cancels class with little warning; she once missed class for a whole week because of a toothache. Avoid this nutty professor by any means necessary.
If you're a Physics or Engineering major, Caldwell will do nothing to translate what is already a very demanding and difficult subject. He lectures with his back to the class and sidesteps questions, scribbling convoluted problems on the blackboard that he inadequately explains and can't complete without his notes or teacher's guide. He manages to make a dull subject even duller; students report that they actually know less after taking Caldwell's courses than they did going into it. Take him only if it's required for your major.
Ermarth is hands-down the worst lecturer at Dartmouth—he is utterly incomprehensible. Ermarth is a fine scholar (he studies German intellectual history) but it's as though his mind unhinges when he steps into the classroom. His lectures are at once dense and rambling, combining numbing, irrelevant tangents with meaningless generalities. He's ultimately impenetrable. It doesn't help that he speaks with a thick accent and is fond of nonsensical analogies: he once claimed that the spread of the Third Reich was like "a spider web with octopus tentacles."
An avid feminist critic, Professor Silver reads literature with the firm belief that anything longer than it is round must be a phallus. Silver is addicted to anything anti-male and holds androgyny to be the human ideal. If you enjoy listening to the classics of Western culture being destroyed by feminist deconstruction, then you will love her lectures.
At least his agenda is clear. Recent publications: (a) "Against Civic Schooling," in Social Philosophy and Policy 21 (January 2004); (b) "Against Civic Education in Public Schools," in Constructing Civic Virtue: A Symposium on the State of American Citizenship (Maxwell School of Syracuse University: Campbell Public Affairs Institute, 2003).
Luxon is Dartmouth's resident Milton scholar, and in fairness, he is generally considered an adequate professor. But he has been known to bring his considerable liberal baggage into class at times. Luxon is strongly influenced by feminist readings of literature. He once stormed out of a showing of Alpha Chi Alpha's infamous 'Hell Night' tape when audience members disagreed with his interpretation.
Professor Edsforth ranks amongst Dartmouth's most notorious profesors. Though he's been here upwards of a decade, he's failed to secure tenure. It's little wonder why, really, considering that Edsforth's particular brand of scholarship is light on disinterested inquiry but heavy on heavy rhetoric worthy of the Daily Worker. Students misfortunate enough to enroll in his 'War and Peace' class last spring learned little about war; some about the evils of American car companies (seriously); much about about castle-in-the-sky theories for world government.
This former department chair has turned off a number of prospective government majors from even taking a second course in the department with his abysmal performances in Government 3. In one of the first professor evaluations in the Review, we wrote of unbearable "Winters in Hanover." Nearly two decades later, he's still here, and somebody forgot to tell him that Mondale lost. Winters claims to be an empiricist, but the only support for his assertions are nonsensical, indecipherable scribbles on the chalkboard. And he often takes to his chalkboard only to use unfamiliar abbreviations and scratched ramblings with arrows to indicate causal relationships that are questionable at best. Winters openly jokes about his own exam format—primarily composed of true-false questions—that fails to give students an opportunity to show what they have learned. |
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